Immigration

New York –  Emily Samantha Ruiz, a 4-year-old girl who was the victim of a mistaken deportation, arrived Wednesday in New York, where she was reunited with her parents, who are from Guatemala and find themselves in an irregular immigration situation.

"Emily has returned to us. We have no words to explain the happiness we feel at seeing her, hugging her and kissing her again," the father of the girl, Leonel Ruiz, said after he and his wife welcomed their daughter at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The girl, carrying a pink backpack, embraced her parents upon her arrival early Wednesday morning at the New York airport.

The mistake that resulted in the young U.S. citizen's deportation to Guatemala occurred on March 11, when Emily and her grandfather were traveling to New York from the Central American country and their flight was diverted to Dulles airport, near Washington D.C., due to bad weather.

The grandfather apparently had immigration infractions dating from the 1990s on his record, but it is not yet clear if he reentered the United States after that with expired documents, although the family's lawyer, David Sperling, said that he has a valid H-2B visa.

Sperling, who traveled to Guatemala to pick up Emily, said that customs agents told the girl's father that they had two options: transfer Emily to a detention center for minors in Virginia or send her back to Guatemala with her grandfather.

The latter was the ultimate decision of the Ruizes, since the authorities did not permit them to pick up the girl at the airport, claiming that the parents had an illegal immigration situation, the attorney said Wednesday.

At that point, the saga began for the Ruiz family, who lives on Long Island and, in seeking help to retrieve their daughter, revealed to the media the case and pointing to the fact that a U.S. citizen had been deported.

"Emily Ruiz is an American, with all the rights and responsibilities. She's not a second-class citizen and ... she deserves equal treatment," Sperling said after the family reunion early on Wednesday morning.

Now that Emily has been reunited with her parents, the Ruiz family drama apparently has come to a close, although millions of undocumented parents in this country still live in fear of being deported and thus separated from their children born in the United States.

Activists and immigrants themselves are continuing to demand that Congress change this situation as part of a comprehensive immigration reform, something that President Barack Obama's administration has not yet undertaken.